By Father Knowledge Centre Europe – FKCE

Lawtext – French text of Belgian law on shared parenting (November 5, 2006)

Belgium has introduced radical reforms to its child custody laws (*). Not only has it forsaken sole custody as the preferred option and adopted shared parenting but has gone so far as to adopt the more radical position of equality between the parents. Not only do both parents share the custody time of their children but they share it equally with ‘alternating residence and care’. Not formulated as a prefixed end result but based in a strong presumption levelling the playing field on physical child custody decisions between the divorcing parents firmly, respecting parent’s own custody decisions by mutual consent and denying shared parenting only on strong objectiviable grounds. Below is the original French text of the Belgian parliamentary law on shared parenting.

(*) Note: Analysis laying out Six Principles on which the Belgian law on shared parenting is premised, can be read at the website :

It is a continental European tradition to implement law reform by formulating a parliamentary law that specifies changes in several basic underlying law codes. The Belgian reform law on shared parenting at hand specified changes to two underlying basic Belgian law codes, i.e. (a) the “Code Civil” and (b) the “Code Judiciaire”. For convenience I have included in the parliamentary law reform text presented below, directlinks to changes subsequently made in the underlying basic Belgian law codes. Following up on these links provides with a better grasp of the law changes in the wider context of the Belgian civil law code and the Belgian Judiciary Code and its execution in the Belgian family courts.

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